23 May
2023
23 May
'23
6:07 a.m.
explor is (was) a graphical language by ken knowlton.
it ran offline on the mainframe and produced a mag tape
to be run on a machine called tapex. the tapex machine
exposed micro-film that had to be developed and printed.
not the quickest turnaround.
anyway, i wrote a unix version of explor that printed directly
on a tek display terminal. it was never really used for
anything. somewhere, i have polaroids of pictures of
explor output on the tek.
On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 5:00 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
Good day, something I've come across in my
documentation study that I
finally got around to researching a bit is a reference to the language
Explor in the V2 ld(I) page:
'There are libraries for Fortran (x="f"), C (x="c"), Explor
(x="e") and B
(x="b").'
The manual has no corresponding mention of any Explor environment, not
even a section VI page. The only other UNIX Explor reference I can easily
find is on the mailing list here indicating that there is a version of
Explor for UNIX on a 1977 tape here (in the 1/explor+dl directory):
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Usenix_77/ug091377.tar.gz
Does anyone know if there is continuity here or if the V2 reference and
the code on the tape are only related in that they're both for Explor?
- Matt G.